Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women's Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

After surviving a severe case of influenza in 1918, Katherine Anne Porter observed, 'It simply divided my life, cut across it.' The 1918 influenza pandemic spanned the volatile early twentieth century, a time period that included the end of World War I and the granting of female suffrage in the Western world. Focusing on major novels and essays by Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Virginia Woolf, this work examines how narratives by women writers engage the 1918 influenza pandemic, emphasizing vision as compensation for losses of both war and disease. Drawing on World War I posters, poetry, songs, drawings, and photographs, the argument offers a persuasive framework for connecting war, disease, and gender to the shock of the modern in twentieth-century culture.